President Trump made headlines this morning when he took to Twitter to disparage his former Apprentice colleague and White House staffer Omarosa Manigault after she released a damning tape in which Trump’s staff can be heard acknowledging the existence of recordings of Trump saying racial slurs and discussing how to “spin” it.

The president, as he is wont to do, lashed out at Omarosa on Twitter, calling her a “crazed crying lowlife” and said she was “fired like a dog” — a remark that quickly raised eyebrows around the nation.

When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took great offense at his words and tore into the President on his show this morning, accusing Trump of dehumanizing Omarosa and of behaving like a fascist dictator on the path to genocide:

“We’ve heard it said before and we’ve heard it discussed before about how tyrants and autocrats and, yes, fascists, communists, others used the language of dehumanization to justify, well, a movement away from democracy and a movement away from decent standards.

Morning Joe seized on the use of “dog” to describe Omarosa and compared it to the language used during genocides to entrench ethnoracial division and legitimize the horrifying crimes committed against different groups.

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. In Rwanda genocide was often justified, calling them cockroaches, slave owners considered slaves subhuman animals.”

“It opens the door for cruelty and genocide. Nobody is saying that Donald Trump is a Nazi, nobody is saying that he’s Adolf Hitler in 1938, 1939, 1940, but you can see time and time again … this is how dictators and tyrants open the door, and they do it by dehumanizing their political opponents.”

While it’s not clear whether or not Trump’s fascistic impulses are behind today’s attack or whether it’s just his bruised ego taking cheap shots at an enemy, either way it’s an absolutely disgraceful state of affairs that we should not have to be dealing with right now.